DevOps for a New Millennium: A Lifecycle Perspective Supporting Business Growth in an Altered Economy

Date: 04/25/2013

Length: 37 pages

Cost: $795.00

Abstract:

This April 2013 report highlights "real world" DevOps as it is practiced by modern companies. It utilizes a combination of EMA Research, DevOps vendor information, and customer case studies to drive home the fact that DevOps has evolved to be far different in practice than is typically presented and generally understood.

During the depths of the "great recession" -- the years between 2008 and 2012 -- hard economic times drove a new pragmatism. Previously content with recouping the costs of enterprise management investments within two to three years, customers demanded payback within 6 to 12 months. Limited budget dollars were spent on investments with near-immediate Return on Investment (ROI). Cloud, wireless, and virtualization grew accordingly, as businesses became more adept at using technology to reduce costs.

Not coincidentally, Agile development and "DevOps" became hot topics. Both satisfied two key requirements that surfaced during the recession: budget maximization and the "need for speed." Industries and regulatory requirements were changing so quickly that software Development and Operations teams were hard pressed to keep up.

The "DevOps" term is used to describe the process of managing the handoffs necessary for Development and Operations teams to work in a collaborative manner. DevOps promises to introduce agility, repeatability, quality, and governance into application delivery via collaboration between the two key teams responsible for the overall process.

Today, we are emerging from the economic "dark ages." Agile development practices have become the de facto standard for software development. However while the benefits of Agile have been proven many times over, many IT leaders still have their doubts about DevOps. A primary reason is because traditional DevOps thinking focuses primarily on the Testing through Deployment stages of the application lifecycle.

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has been researching the growth of both Agile and DevOps practices for several years and found that DevOps has evolved as a far more cross-functional, collaborative, and lifecycle-focused activity than traditionally understood. It now spans the application lifecycle versus being confined to a "point in time" handover of responsibility at deployment.

This paper describes the "new DevOps" in more detail, and illustrates these points with research, end-user case studies, and vendor input.